


Ghost Ship

by honeylocusttree



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, Gen, This fic is gen, War, Warning: violence, warning: death, warning: gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-31
Updated: 2020-07-31
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:02:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25632526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honeylocusttree/pseuds/honeylocusttree
Summary: After the destruction of their village by the Fire Nation, Sokka and Katara flee alone into the icy wilderness of the South Pole, where they make an unexpected discovery that will change the course of their lives. (Pt 1)Note: PLEASE heed the warnings, contains some graphic imagery.
Kudos: 10





	Ghost Ship

**Author's Note:**

> A plea from the author: PLEASE heed the warnings, they are not there for fun. This is not the darkest thing I’ve ever written, but it probably is the darkest thing I’ve done for a property that was originally marketed to kids/teens. If you are either and don’t want to be sad/distressed/unsettled (or if you’re an adult and want to avoid that) YOU SHOULD PROBABLY SKIP THIS FIC.

_The great sea  
_ _Has sent me adrift,_

 _It moves me as the weed in the great river,_  
_Earth and the great weather  
_ _Move me._

— _Uvavnuk_

**Part One**

They walked alone beneath the stars. Sokka's clothes smelled of grease, and burning. His hair was loose beneath the hood of his parka, singed in places. A crust of blood sutured the wound on his jaw. Katara beside him was similarly disheveled, face streaked with ashes, a dark smear on her forehead. She'd knelt near the boat when they departed and scrubbed at her face with snow, but it hadn't worked. The stain remained, like a curse.

They'd left the boat wedged into the snowbank of the inlet where they abandoned it, two days' journey behind them. The Fire Nation wouldn't pursue them this far into the icy wilderness. Sokka was confident that they wouldn't. Why waste the men and resources chasing two Water Tribe refugees into the interior, when nature would no doubt do their job for them? Their soldiers were cruel, but not stupid.

He looked up. The moon hung clear and bright, halfway through its month-long journey across the sky. He'd heard that in other parts of the world the moon rose and set every night, year-round. It was difficult to imagine how such a thing could be, or what that would be like. The sun, he'd heard, also rose and set every day throughout the year, which of course was absurd. Perhaps that was the reason for the Fire Nation's terrifying violence—perhaps the sun and moon hurtling across the sky at breakneck speed, regardless of season, simply drove them all mad.

The lode star hung just below the moon, pointing the way north. Other constellations wheeled around it, the owl-shrike and the vulture-eel the most familiar.: hunters' constellations, signifying the season of returning penguin-seals. The hunting would likely be good this season.

But there would be no men to wield spears, and no mouths to feed anyway.

“Sokka,” Katara said, words a pale puff in the air, “Do you really think we can cross the glacier?”

Her voice was small in the darkness, a lonely thing. Sokka looked at his sister, perched atop the white snow as if she wore a fine pair of snowshoes, or as if she were weightless. She stood as something unreal against the vast emptiness, for a moment like an emissary from another world. Behind her the landscape stretched away, the sky black and the stars innumerable...and against them the great blot, the shadow of old Simirsuaq, the glacier.

“We can cross it,” Sokka said, through stiff lips, feigning confidence he didn't feel.

-

_The Fire Nation came during the sleep watch, when fires were low and Sokka was nodding off on guard. He hadn't seen the soot-blackened snow when it began to fall, but he'd heard the ships long before he saw them. The noise of their engines carried over the water._

_Katara had been bringing him some hot otter-seal blood stew when he first registered the dull mechanical noise, ragged and alien against the stillness of the snow. Sokka was looking back at this sister, mouth open to say something clever about the quality of her cooking, when they both registered the gravelly roar of the warship’s engines, carrying over the waves, bouncing off the nearby cliffs of ice._

_Katara dropped the bowl, and blood spilled thick and red over the snow. Sokka leapt to his feet with a shout, a ragged noise that carried in the frozen air. He ran to the alarm and snatched up the bone hammer, slammed it against the drumhead, and screamed._

_“Wake up!” he yelled, even as his sister dashed back into camp, shouting the same at the top of her lungs, “They’re here! They found us! Wake up and run!”_

_Instantly the camp came alive, women and elderly spilling out of their homes with children and small packs, scrambling to gather up as many supplies as they could. A cacophony of voices filled the air, frightened and bewildered. Children shrieked. Someone began crying._

_Katara herded them quickly toward the exit in the east wall. Sokka ran down to their own tent and scrambled through their gear, shoving whatever he could lay his hands on, that wasn’t already packed, into two bags. He snatched up a pair of snowshoes he didn’t have time to put on as an afterthought._

_His skin was on fire, his heart in his throat, choking him. He ground his teeth to keep them from chattering, but he could feel the way his ribs rattled, heart stuttering in his chest. Burning. Burning._

_The noise of the ship’s engines were louder now. He could picture it, an ashen darkness cutting through the water, savage and mechanical. He stumbled out of the tent and ran to his sister, where the last of the elderly were staggering on frail legs through the exit. Katara had a child on her back and she looked at her brother with eyes so wide he could see the whites around her irises._

_“Sokka,” she whispered._

_“Go! Go!” he urged, pushing her along, pushing Granny Kanut along, forcing his legs to drive forward even as they wanted to tremble and collapse._

_Behind came the sound of shearing, shrieking ice, the boom and crack of destruction. The ground beneath them trembled at the violation. Sokka gritted his teeth, and drove them all, staggering, out into the snow._

-

When the wind rose and threw a ragged veil over the stars, Katara finally called a halt.

“We have to stop. I can't make heads or tails out of our position. We can at least make camp for a few hours, before we move on.”

Sokka opened his mouth to argue, but thought better of it. Sure, their situation was precarious—miles from anything he recognized, on strange ice, with no familiar landmarks to suggest direction beyond the mass of the glacier looming on the horizon, but he knew enough to trust his sister on this. Rushing off into a snowblind void was the stuff cautionary tales for children were made of.

He took his sister's pack without a word, and watched as she muttered and waved her arms in big, awkward shapes, against all logic somehow scoring out a burrow with her bending that would hide them from the polar dogs and the worst of the cold and snow.

“Come on,” she said once she’d finished her construction project, “There’s just enough space for both of us.”

The exhaustion that he’d been trying to ignore crashed over him all at once. He barely managed to finish squirming into the little hole before the deep wave of sleep crested over him and hauled him down into its profound embrace.

For a while, he slept, and forgot.

It was the cold that woke him, the slow creeping awareness of absence at his side, where his sister’s warmth had been moments before. He snapped awake all at once, blind in the dark, one arm gone numb under his body. He tried to scramble upright and smacked his head on the roof of the burrow.

“Ow!” he hissed, collapsing onto his belly and pressing a mittened hand to the back of his head. His eyes stung in the sudden onslaught of chill, and pricked with tears.

“Katara,” he hissed into the lonely darkness, “ _Katara!_ ” Fear gripped him then, tight and awful. His sister was gone—his family. Spirited away into the night, the cold. He was alone. Alone alone alone—

“Sokka!” Katara’s voice drifted down, stopping his terror in its tracks. He choked on his next cry, clamping his lips shut, clenching his jaw.

She called again, softly. “Sokka,” she nearly whispered, “Sokka, come and see!”

He crawled out into the dark and stood with aching slowness, rubbing his eyes. He couldn’t afford tears. He staggered over to his sister, across the creaking snow. The wind had settled and the moon shone huge and golden, brightly enough to cast shadows. Katara stood some twenty yards away, outlined in the light, looking away into the distance. When Sokka started to speak, she looked at him, briefly, then away again. She lifted a hand, and pointed.

Her hand seemed to be trembling. Sokka followed the line of her gesture, and then he started, and rubbed his eyes again, unsure of what he was seeing. Suddenly he was afraid.

“Wh-what is it?” he whispered.

Katara lowered her hand. There was no doubt now that she was trembling.

“I don't know,” she said, voice low.

Sokka didn't answer. Couldn't have if he'd wanted to.

Far away on the empty plain, in the great silence, a shadow moved across the faintly glowing snow. Something enormous and long legged strode through the night. Pale lights shone and flickered around its slow bulk, like the lights of some tiny sea creatures, awash in the summer tide.

Sokka felt himself shiver. His mouth was dry. He didn’t know what he was seeing. It was not an animal, was far larger than the largest sea creature he’d ever seen or heard tell of. It was certainly larger than a dwelling, larger even than his home, which the Fire Nation had destroyed. If he’d been standing beneath it he could have watched its enormous bulk pass by overhead and it likely would never have even noticed him, in the same way that it was easy to ignore tiny shards of ice, or pebbles in the sand.

It was moving steadily from west to east, vast in the starlight. Sokka felt his own smallness then, keen and profound, like a piercing light. Like a fishook in his heart, he felt himself caught by the silence, caught and held. It was a part of him, the stillness, that huge and empty snowscape and the bottomless, star-filled sky. It was part of him, and he was part of all of it.

“What is it?” he heard himself ask again, and his voice sounded very far away.

“I think...” Katara said, “I think that it's a spirit.”

Sokka blinked once, slowly. The great, light-speckled shadow kept moving away, away, and they watched it for a long time, until the cold began to creep into his fingers and toes.

Finally, when it had disappeared over the far horizon, his sister stirred. She looked at him.

“Something is...happening,” she said. “Something new.”

Sokka didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure he knew how. He looked down at his feet and fought to get control of his tongue. To make any kind of sound at all.

“We should,” he coughed, cleared his throat, and tried again, “We should keep moving.”

-

_They fled, straggling across the snow and ice. Despite Sokka and Katara’s best efforts to keep everyone together they spread out into a sprawling line, women clutching their children, the elderly struggling along, leaning on the young, faces pale with terror._

“ _Make the for boats!” Katara was yelling, “No, not that way!” This at a handful of older boys who, in the grip of terror, were scrambling uphill toward the line of distant cliffs to the northeast, as if they would offer shelter. As if they were fleeing a storm, a natural disaster, that would pass them by if only they could hide._

“ _Not that way!” Sokka echoed when he saw what was happening. He caught Katara’s eye, then without another word shoved the bags at her before struggling up the hill after the boys._

_Except that they were moving too fast. Sokka was older, taller, but he was afraid to lose sight of the rest of the people under his care. Even as Katara herded them down to the eastern stream, the one that ran deep into the cracked landscape of the late winter ravines, Sokka strove to chase the three youths as they pelted across the snow toward the looming cliffs._

“ _Not that way!” he shouted again, voice hoarse. “They’ll chase you! They’ll find you!”_

_But the boys were running, running, away across the snow, swift as caribou-deer. They were lit up by the moon. Panting, Sokka slowed to a stop and watched them run, like comets arcing across the sky, away from him. Beautiful and bright, and eerily silent._

_They were gone. They were already lost._

_Cursing, eyes burning, he turned back to the river, slid and stumbled down the hill toward the rest of his people._

_As he caught up with his sister he chanced a look back toward the village wall. He could see smoke, rising._

-

Spring was right around the corner, which was the only reason they were still alive. There was no way to build a fire out here in the waste, no way to get warm aside from movement, or the presence of another body. But the fact that it was tent-raising season meant that they hadn’t frozen to death on their first night fleeing down the river, and the flowing water had been swifter and higher than even a week ago, thanks to some early icemelt.

Fortunately it wasn’t warm enough to turn the snowplain into a slushy deathtrap, but the cold wouldn’t kill them outright simply from standing still for more than a few minutes at a time. They were able to keep up the pace they’d set after they abandoned the boat and fled into the interior, walking for three watches and resting the fourth. They ate while on the move, frozen cubes of sharkwhale blubber and seal jerky, though Katara had a handful of frozen polar berries she’d saved that they savored, as they drove themselves onward.

In this way they made excellent time, in spite of their exhaustion. They kept a sharp watch for predators, especially polar-dogs, though they weren’t known to hunt this far inland. Sokka considered it would be just their luck to run afoul of such a creature now, when they were weak, and he had only his club and boomerang. It was certainly possible the smell of blood and ashes would attract them.

It was on the third day on the march that a horrible thought occurred to him, which he didn’t dare voice to his sister: that the reason they’d seen no predators at all was because the animals had followed the smell of death, back there at the village, and every meat eater in a hundred miles was now congregated at the site of the carnage.

He almost sat down in the snow then and there. Katara, a few paces ahead, happened to look back when he staggered, and a frown of concern passed across her face.

“Sokka?” she said.

“It’s nothing.” He waved a hand, tried to make it careless, swallowing back the bile, “I’m fine.”

When she looked away from him again, turning her attention back to the stars she was using to navigate, he passed a hand across his face.

On the fifth day they began picking their way through the more difficult terrain at the foot of the glacier. The land was more broken here, in places, the bones of the earth showing through, dark against the snow. Sokka vaguely remembered it from a trip he’d taken with his father and a hunting party over ten years previous.

“There’s a ridge,” he said, that sleep-watch, crammed into the little burrow with his sister and enjoying the feeling of relative warmth. “We’ll have to go around a bit to the south, but unless the ice has shifted a _lot_ , we can climb it. I th—I mean. I’m sure we can. If we cross it, we’ll come to the eastern shore. The camp there might be able to help us.” _If the Fire Nation hasn’t got_ _ten_ _there first_ , he didn’t say, because the thought was too horrible to contemplate. _If the Fire Nation isn’t cruising the Southern Sea and systematically eradicating every Water Tribe settlement they can find._

Katara pressed her lips together and nodded. “We can do it,” she said, voice shaky but shot through with a few threads of confidence. Sokka grinned at her, the gesture more or less invisible in the dark.

“Sure we can,” he said.

He woke up once, in the night, to the sound of his sister crying softly.

In the morning, they struck out southward. It took several hours to reach the site that he remembered from his long-ago sojourn with their father. When they reached it, they stood looking up at the wall of the glacier for a long while. Sokka’s shoulders slumped.

“There’s just...no other way,” he said finally, softly.

Katara nodded wordlessly. Sokka’s words were true. The only way to the eastern camp this time of year was either by boat, which they could not risk in case the Fire Nation still patrolled the waters, or across the glacier on foot, a journey of almost two weeks across a landscape more unforgiving than the one they had already crossed.

Absently, Katara rubbed at the dark mark on her forehead. It had become something of a nervous tick for her in the past few days. The mark had faded a bit, but somehow never seemed to go away completely.

“It’s just...so high,” she sighed.

“Could you, I don’t know,” he waved a hand vaguely, “Waterbend us up there?”

She stared at him for a moment, then looked at her hand. She made a few hesitant gestures, stirring the loose snow around them into whorls, before shaking her head.

“I wouldn’t even know how to start,” she said. “We’ll just have to, you know.” It was her turn to wave a hand vaguely.

“Right.” He squared his shoulders, then said, “We might as well eat something before we get started.”

They ate standing, moving around in small circles to keep their blood circulating, flexing their fingers in their mittens. The sky was overcast again, lit from behind by the moon, almost pearlescent. Beautiful in its own way.

In the end, Katara’s bending _did_ assist with the climb, as she was able to carve out foot and handholds in places where they might otherwise have struggled, and they were able to move more quickly than Sokka had dared hope. It was a shallow slope, and could be ascended, with care, simply by putting one foot in front of the other, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t treacherous. Nevertheless, they made good time, and with Katara’s assistance they would likely reach the top before the end of the second watch.

After that…

He didn’t let himself think about it. Just like he wasn’t thinking about what they’d left behind. About why they were out here, alone.

(The smell of smoke or the sounds of screams, torn from the throats of people he—people he loved—)

He stopped where he was, suddenly, panting and squeezing his eyes shut while he clutched at the stone and ice beneath him. He had a sudden, awful vertigo, that had nothing to do with the relative height of their position. He was hanging onto the earth for dear life. If he let go, he would spin away into the void. Like a forgotten star, wandering forever through the aching emptiness.

“ _Sokka_.”

He heard his name, hissed sharply, like a warning. His eyes snapped open.

Above him, and a little to the right, Katara was leaning against the ridge, her back to him. Both feet were on a jutting stone ledge, and her left arm was braced herself against the ice wall. She stood straight, balanced on the stone. She was looking away and down. Sokka remembered that from this position a portion of the sea was visible, frothing against the side of the glacier not far from where they had begun their climb.

“K’tara?” Sokka slurred, voice hoarse as if he’d been ill, or asleep.

“We have to go back down,” she said, looking over her shoulder at him, left hand clenching into a fist against the green ice of the ridge.

“What?” he gawped at her. “We—what? We can’t! We’ll fall! We’ll fall down and break all our arms and legs, and then we’ll lie there until the vulture-eels crawl up and eat out faces!”

“Ugh!” She turned fully to face him, executing the maneuver flawlessly, as if she’d spent her whole life climbing around on the sides of glaciers. She stared into Sokka’s eyes with flinty determination. “We are going. Back down.”

“No we are not! Because...” he flailed, “Because I’m the oldest! And. You have to listen to me—!”

“Sokka, there’s a ship!” she interrupted, cutting through his objections sharp and hard. Sokka’s words dried up in his throat. He opened and shut his mouth. He felt a pressure on his jaw, on the wound there, and realized after a moment that it was his own hand, pressing against it.

_A red flower...a red light. A white light. It happened in slow motion._

_A woman fell in the snow, blossoming like a torch. A woman fell...it was Yuka. She was burning. Her eyes were open. Her mouth was open._

_There were dark forms crossing the snow. Their hands were on fire. They didn’t make a sound as they ran, they didn’t cry out like animals, like men. They didn’t make a sound. They ran, with their hands on fire._

Sokka’s mouth worked. He choked out a cracked syllable, and another.

“A F-” he tried again, “A Fire Nation ship?”

“Maybe,” Katara’s eyes softened. Sokka averted his gaze, afraid of whatever she’d seen in his face. “But it’s half buried in ice, on the beach. It looks like it ran aground.”

“So it’s not...” he took a breath. “It’s not important, then.”

“Except it is! Because there might be supplies. Food! Other...things.” She waved one hand in the air. “Sokka, listen.” She paused, took a breath. “I know what you’re not saying, okay? I know that we’re not. Not prepared, not really, to get across Simirsuaq.”

He felt a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature. “Katara, I— ”

“We need food for two weeks,” she barreled on over him, “We need a way to make a shelter, I don’t think I can bend a pit out of the ice, I don’t know. We can’t—” She broke off and looked away. “We don’t have any chance of reaching the eastern camp, Sokka, not really. I know that we don’t. Okay?”

Sokka looked down. He couldn’t meet her eyes.

“So then, what?” he asked. “You were just going to...to let me...”

“We had to try.” Her voice was like dry, fresh snow, caught up in a gentle breeze. Thin, almost weightless. “We had to do...something. The Fire Nation couldn’t be allowed to just _get away with it_. But. You and I both know we had no real chance of making it to the other side. We will absolutely freeze to death up there, exposed and alone. And dad...he’ll never know. He’ll come back from sea and...and he’ll never find our bodies. No one will. Only the wind, and maybe the spirits.

“But,” she went on, gesturing toward the sea, toward the beach that Sokka couldn’t see from his position, “There’s a crashed ship down there. And that means maybe supplies. Even if there’s no food, there might be other things. Maybe we can stay there for a while, until the spring gets under way. Maybe we can build a boat, and sail to the eastern settlement, after the Fire Nation is gone. We could survive, Sokka. Isn’t that worth it?”

Sokka stared at her. His mouth worked for a moment. He had a brief, awful image of himself and his sister, lying on the ice, a pair of frozen corpses scoured by the wind.

He let out a breath.

“Yeah,” he said faintly. “Yeah, it’s worth it.”

“Great,” she grinned at him, “So let’s go back down!”

-

_Fire Nation soldiers were relentless. They were known for it._

_Fleeing from them by boat was not just a good idea, it was the only way to escape the monsters. The enormous foreign icebreaker ship could, possibly, follow their tiny handmade umiaks into the frigid wilderness, but it would take time and skill that the Fire Nation navy almost certainly did not possess._

_But they had to reach the boats first. And the river was a five minute walk from the settlement. Normally, that time was not an issue. But suddenly, here and now, it was._

_Old Saghani stumbled and fell, and Sokka without hesitating swept her up and onto his back, even as he staggered under the weight. She was old, and frail, but he was only fifteen. Adrenaline and terror were the only things keeping him on his feet._

“ _We’re almost there!” Katara shouted. “Look, there are the boats!”_

_They were skidding across the ice, eerily silent, for no one had breath for screaming._

_So it happened silently, when the first flames reached them. It happened in slow motion._

_A_ _red flower...a red light. A white light._ _Sokka saw it out of the corner of his eye, and when he turned his head he saw Yuka. Her mouth was opening wider and wider, a dark hole, and fires bloomed from her back like scarlet snowflowers. There was no sound, at first, then a high-pitched whine penetrated Sokka’s awareness, thin and faint, but growing louder._

_The scream struck him like a physical blow. Yuka_ _fell in the snow, blossoming like a torch._ _Screaming._ _Everyone was screaming, a hurricane of noise, a wall of horror. Deafening._

_He made the mistake of looking back._ _There were dark forms crossing the snow. Their hands were on fire. They didn’t make a sound as they ran, they didn’t cry out like animals, like men. They didn’t make a sound. They ran, with their hands on fire._

_T_ _hey were demons._

“ _Get in the boats!” He screamed, dashing with Saghani toward the relative safety of the water. But half the people were frozen in horror, feet locked in place._

“ _Move!” Katara yelled, and then fireballs rained down on them._

_Sokka hurled himself on the ground._ _Heat exploded in the air around him, and fire hissed into the snow._ _The ground was shaking._

_H_ _e had to get up. He dug his hands into the snow and pushed, forcing himself upward._

_Katara was there, suddenly, helping to pull him upright._

“ _We have to go,” she said yelled, over the sounds of screaming, of children and women shrieking, crying out. “We have to go!”_

_The dark shapes were among them, and the air smelled of burning. Bodies...he retched but forced himself to swallow. He couldn’t stop. Not now._

_He and Katara struggled to herd whoever was nearest toward the boats. They managed to gather up a few, those young enough, with their wits still about them. They collected a few children._

_They made it into the umiaks, and Sokka watched a Fire Nation soldier plunge into the river_ _when the ice bank gave way,_ _and for the first time_ _make_ _a sound. He screamed a_ _s_ _cold closed on his metal armor like a fist._

_Katara stood up in the boat. Sokka watched her make a huge arcing motion with both arms, and a wave of water surged up_ _from under_ _them and the other boats, slamming into the snowy shore, hammering the Fire Nation soldiers._

_Then she sucked the water back toward them_ _and away again, using_ _it to propel the boats forward, down the river. Sokka looked up at his sister in awe. He could see sweat on her face, even in the dark. He could hear her harsh breathing as she_ _pulled_ _the water, pushed and pulled and pushed again._

_She looked down at him._

“ _Row!” she_ _screamed_ _, and he grabbed up the paddle and dug it into the water._

-

It took an hour to pick their way carefully back down the slope, and they stopped to rest at the bottom. This time Sokka did sit down in the snow, pushing his parka hood back, yanking off his mitten and raking a bare hand through his loose hair. His legs were trembling. He was dangerously close to real exhaustion.

Until this point, he realized, he’d been operating from a place of emotional numbness. He had gone forward only because to go back would be to plunge into a dark void, from where there was no escape. But now...now the way forward had changed. The ice had shifted, and he wasn’t sure he could adjust in time.

He shut his eyes on an exhale. Despite the cold, he felt overheated. He wipe his face again. Blood from his old wound flaked away, and in sudden frustration he scrubbed at it. Then he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, hands on the back of his neck, pressing down.

He didn’t look up at the approach of footsteps. Didn’t look up at the sound of Katara sitting down beside him, pressing her side against his. He couldn’t feel her warmth. Everything was too warm, or perhaps too cold. He thought of the hunter’s sickness, when the cold came on so strongly a hunter might lose his way, flee deeper into the wilderness, shedding his clothes as he went. It could take some that way, he’d heard. Sometimes in the moments before freezing to death, a person would feel an unaccountable warmth, like the embrace of a loved one, and they would lie there in the snow and let death take them.

“Sokka,” his sister said, and nothing else.

“I failed,” he said faintly, through stiff lips, and nothing else.

Katara swallowed. He heard her throat click, the sound loud in the silence.

She didn’t say anything for a long time. He sat there in the snow, possibly growing colder, though he couldn’t feel it. He couldn’t feel anything but the licking flames of the abyss, the darkness behind him, reaching out. He was afraid, he wanted to stand up and run, but instead he sat as if paralyzed, waiting for it to reach out. For the fire to claim him too.

A hand pressed against his arm. Gentle, but with strength behind it too.

“Sokka,” Katara said, “I’m still alive.”

He opened his eyes, and looked at her. In the moonlight her own eyes were chips of blue ice. Her grip on his arm tightened.

“We have to live,” she said.

It was as if she’d struck him. All the air went out of him in a rush and he hunched forward with a hand over his mouth, choking on a sob. Katara grabbed him around the shoulders, both arms encircling him, holding on. Sokka gasped out wetly against his hand, but fought back the tears. He couldn’t afford it. It was too dangerous to cry, in the cold.

Still he went on shuddering, his sister holding on to his shoulders, and it took a long time to get himself under control.

After a while he became aware of a sound, thin and clear, a single note threading around itself. It sounded familiar, but it still took him a long time to realize that it was Katara’s voice.

She was singing.

He sat with her and listened, until he was able to recognize the song. It was a very old one, a hunter’s song, and not a one for a woman to sing at all. But the sound was comforting. It was the litany of seasons, and the turning of the moon and sun, and the changes in the sea and the rivers. Katara wound down when she got to the part about the otter-seal pups, and smiled when she saw Sokka watching her.

“All things in their own time, Sokka,” she said, eyes glittering, “Dad told us that.”

Sokka snorted wetly. He wiped at his eyes, although they were dry.

“He was talking about caribou-deer pelts,” he reminded her, but in spite of himself, he smiled.

“All things in their own time,” she repeated, firmly. She stood up and brushed snow off her legs. “I whined about getting a new dress for weeks, remember?” She held out a hand to him and he let her pull him upright. “We have to survive. So we can see him again.”

“I don’t think he’s going to be bringing you a new dress,” he said, brushing snow off of himself, and Katara laughed.

“Shut up,” she said, smiling.

They made their way with care in the direction of the sea. They still had to struggle through the difficult landscape in the moonlight, and Sokka was concentrating more on his footwork than the destination. He didn’t even realize they had rounded a jutting bulwark of glacial ice until Katara stopped moving and drew a hissing breath.

“Wow, it’s...it’s a lot bigger than I thought.”

Sokka came up behind her shoulder and looked. He let out a low whistle.

The ship _was_ large, though, he reflected, probably smaller than the spirit or whatever-it-was that they’d seen a few days previous. It was certainly larger than any of the ships in their father’s fleet. The metal prow was rammed up into the glacier and the entire foredeck seemed to be buried in ice, and enormous chunks of it were tumbled all around.

The beach itself was a narrow stretch of black stones, washed to shining smoothness by the frothing waves. There was no logical reason why the ship should have even tried to effect a landing here, and Sokka could see now that it was listing slightly to one side.

“It looks like it was driven here,” Katara mused, rubbing her chin with the back of her mittened hand. “There’s no way they were trying to land.”

“I was thinking that,” Sokka agreed. “What do you suppose happened?”

Katara shook her head, but in that moment something caught her eye. She pointed.

“Look, the top, the tower. It looks like something ripped the roof off.”

Sokka squinted, and indeed against the luminous backdrop of the clouds it was possible to see that the dark blot of what would have been a tower (the helm?) seemed to have been turned into a metallic wound, shards stabbing at the sky.

“It’s like they were attacked...” he mused slowly, “By something that...explodes?”

The looked at each other, neither quite sure how to parse the riddle.

“It looks dead,” Katara said eventually. “I think it’s okay to get closer.”

They approached with caution. Sokka walked as softly as he ever had on the hunt. Katara was doing her waterbender walk-on-the-snow thing again. Even in the frigid silence, they made no noise at all.

When they were within shouting distance of the ship, Sokka held up a forestalling hand. Katara watched him as he squatted and ran a hand over the nearest sections of tumbled ice and snow. His brow furrowed.

“This is,” he said, he began, then shook his head. “Katara, this snow is almost freshly cut. The ship hasn’t been here for very long.”

“How long?” she asked.

He eyed the sheared snow, picked up a rock of ice and weighed it in his hand. Even in the moonlight he could see flecks of ash and flaked metal staining its surface.

“Very fresh,” he said finally. “Two days, maybe three.”

Her eyes widening, she looked up at the ship where it loomed over them. It seemed silent, dead. They could both smell the metal stink of it, and the noxious fumes where oil must have been leaking out of wherever the engines were, on the opposite side. But there was suddenly a very real possibility that something had survived within its monstrous belly.

“There might be...firebenders in there.”

Sokka stood up, stamping his feet to release the snow from his knees. “There might be injured firebenders in there,” he said quietly.

Katara looked at him. Her face with inscrutable.

“The ship is dead. It won’t sail again. If anyone was alive when it struck, they must have abandoned ship. Right?”

Sokka shrugged. Who could say what fire monsters would or wouldn’t do when their machines failed? Maybe they would stay on board and the strong would eat the weak. Maybe they would all leap into the sea to be devoured by otter-seals. Anything was possible.

“We’re here now,” he said. “If they were going to come rushing out and attack us, they’d have done it already. I don’t think anybody’s in there.”

Katara pressed her lips together. She looked again at the wall of snow burying the prow of the ship.

“Maybe we can find some supplies inside, and maybe we can still get across the glacier if we do,” She said thoughtfully, “Or we could stay for a while. Maybe we can fish from here. And the sun will be rising in a few weeks. We could look for supplies to build a raft.”

Sokka looked out toward the horizon, a thin silver line.

“It’s hard to believe,” he said. “It’s been ages, since we’ve seen the sun.”

Katara chuckled. “If we live that long, I’ll count it as a victory.”

Sokka grinned at her, surprising himself.

-

_In the end, it wasn’t enough._

_The soldiers were too strong. Katara simply wasn’t strong enough, on her own, to push them back. And she was untrained. When she finally collapsed, trembling and half-conscious, in the umiak, Sokka grabbed both oars and rowed with a strength he hadn’t known he possessed._

_Later he would wish that he had gone back, somehow, to fight. That he’d had a moment, a breath, to spare to urge the others onward. But a fireball screamed down into the water and cast a curtain of water and steam between himself and the others, and the river carried him on, and when he himself finally collapsed beside his sister, trembling and weak from exhaustion and fear, he looked around and realized that they were alone._

_The sky was black and the moon was high and clear. The river was darker than the sky, cutting through the white wilderness, carrying them silently along. Sokka’s ears were ringing and he couldn’t hear anything else, but a faint wind whispered over his cheeks and ears like a caress, and stirred the snow on the riverbanks._

_The water here was gentle, for all that it was dark. There were no devious currents and there would be no unexpected ice floes. Sokka laid one shaking and blistered hand on the nearest oar, but didn’t have the strength to grasp it, much less put it in the water._

_They drifted, carried by water, alone beneath the stars._

_-_

Unsurprisingly, there was no easy way to get onto the deck, far above their heads. Katara, after some trial and error, pushed and heaved a misshapen mound of snow up against the metal hull that allowed them to clamber aboard.

The moment Sokka set foot on the metal deck, he shuddered. He stopped, leaning on the gunwale, and looked longingly back down at the dark beach and the foaming waters there.

“Hey,” Katara said, “Come on.”

The ship was utterly silent. No engines hummed, and no sounds of life echoed from within its metal belly. As they crossed the deck they were forced to avoid enormous metal shards that had clearly hammered down with force, and were now embedded in the deck. Katara wordlessly pointed out dark marks and holes scored into the surface as well.

“It looks like they were in a battle,” Sokka said softly.

“With what though?” Katara shook her head.

“Maybe they’re fighting each other?” Sokka tried not to let hope creep into his voice at the thought. If there was even a possibility that the Fire Nation might be experiencing some kind of infighting….

“Hmm,” Katara said, and nothing else.

The entire ship had the feel of a dead firepit, all cold ashes and coals. It was eerie.

“We could go down,” Katara said, when they reached a hatch in the deck. She turned to look back at the shattered tower behind them. “Or we could go up.”

Sokka thinned his lips. He stared at what was basically a hole at his feet. It didn’t seem inviting. He looked back at the tower, looming against the stars, shattered and ruined.

“I’m going to light the lamp,” he said finally.

It took time to dig out the lamp and the fuel, and the spark rocks. He had a small tinder ball in a sealskin pouch, which he tipped onto the palm of his hand.

“This is all we have,” he said.

Katara nodded. “Use half.”

In the end he used more than half, and when the lamp was lit, he was forced to put the little tinder ball out under his boot. He watched the thin line of smoke rise and then blow away on the breeze.

The lamp gave off a warm and friendly glow, and holding it up, Sokka was able to see his sister’s face clearly for the first time in days. She looked exhausted, worn out, and the soot mark on her face stood out starkly. But her eyes were bright and clear.

“Let’s check the tower first,” he said, and Katara nodded.

They crept more cautiously now, through the doorway and into the deeper silence within. Sokka felt the back of his neck prickle. The air smelled of burning, a dense odor that crawled in the room like an evil spirit. His lip curled.

Outside the circle of lamplight the moon shone through blasted windows, picking out shapes that he couldn’t identify. Mysterious detritus crunched under their booted feet. They went with great care, pausing every few moments to listen. The silence became increasingly oppressive, to the point where Sokka had to fight a ridiculous urge to yell, or whistle, or do _something_ to break it.

When Katara pointed up at a hatch leading to the next level, Sokka held up a hand and listened. They both stood very still, breathing shallowly, but no sound came to their ears aside from the distant rhythm of the waves outside, and the creaking of the ice.

The climbed.

When they reached the next level they found that the smell of burning was even worse. Sokka clapped a hand across his nose and mouth. Katara covered hers with both hands, looking around with her eyes wide.

They could see, through the great empty spaces where windows had been, the ocean stretching far away. The owl-shrike was low, nearly hugging the horizon.

Sokka swung the lamp in a slow arc. Everything in the room was ruined, although he could make out the shapes of what must once have been chairs, a table, and various metal instruments. The lamplight picked out scattered shards of twisted metal that once would have gleamed and were now coated in soot.

Katara seemed to have drifted toward one far corner of the room. In the silence, Sokka could hear her breathing.

He heard when it stopped, and the harsh gasp that followed.

“Sokka,” she said on a strained exhale. “You need to bring the lamp over here _right now._ ”

The urgency in her voice propelled him to act without a thought. He began scrambling in her direction. He tripped over something that clattered, banged his shin on the wreckage of a table, and, hopping and cursing, staggered to a halt by his sister.

She had dropped to her knees and as he watched she began heaving at a pile of material, some kind of heavy skin or cloth, and what might have been shelving. Metal screeched and soot flew into the air. Katara coughed, but didn’t stop.

“Bring the light,” she said without looking up.

Sokka leaned down. The golden lamplight fell in a circle on the rubble at his feet. He saw what it was that had so disturbed his sister.

A hand, coated in ash. Sokka jerked back instinctively, and the light flared up the wall, illuminating more dark streaks.

“Keep still!” Katara hissed. Sokka staggered to his knees beside his sister.

“What—” he began, but his suddenly dry throat clicked shut. He watched as her scrabbling hands pulled even as his own empty hand fell nerveless by his side.

“This is...” Katara trailed off. She sat back on her heels, clutching a hunk of metal. Sokka stared. In his hand, the lamp trembled. Slowly, he lowered it. The circle of light grew smaller and smaller.

“It’s a...” he whispered, but his voice faded to silence.

The sound of the ocean reached his ears, the old familiar rush of waves on the beach. He could feel the weight of something huge bearing down on him.

In the little room, he and his sister were very quiet. But not as quiet as the young Fire Nation soldier lying in the wreckage, scarred face bloodied and bruised, as still as the dead.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Thanks for reading! I started writing this last year and couldn’t really get anywhere with it, though the premise was pretty clear in my brain. I’m not sure why I was suddenly able to write the other ¾ of it but I think it might have had something to do with all the stuff I was reading about wilderness survival.
> 
> There is meant to be a part 2 to this, from Katara’s POV. I debated with myself about whether to post this since that part isn’t written, but being as it took me a year to write this, and I almost lost the original bits when Windows destroyed my partitions and it took me like a week to recover the material, I figured I’d go ahead and archive it here for security at the very least. If I manage to post part 2 I'll likely convert this to a multi-chapter fic.
> 
> This was originally inspired by some thoughts I had about Of Monsters and Men’s “Your Bones,” which is even more depressing than this fic, imho. But I liked the imagery and associated ideas of fleeing an invading force in a little boat. Except instead of trying to cross the ocean they..didn’t. I guess I could’ve written it that way, but it seems that the Fire Nation is patrolling the seas around the South Pole so that probably would have gone badly for everyone tbh.
> 
> 2\. CULTURE: I leaned pretty hard into the Inuit cultures and languages while writing this. I know Water Tribe culture isn’t a 1:1 parallel for the cultures and languages of the arctic circle, but I needed something to work with to help me ground it and give it a sense of reality, and for all that we see of the Water Tribe we don’t spend a whole lot of time learning about the landscape or what it’s like to actually live in the South Pole. And I didn’t want to start making too much stuff up! So I was lazy and stole from real stuff.   
>    
> Some resources:
> 
> https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/names-months-inuktitut-aseena-mablick-1.3977403”
> 
> https://www.tusaalanga.ca/glossary/
> 
> The quote at the top is from an Inuit shaman of the 19th century: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/uvavnuk  
> 
> 
> I actually had a really hard time finding more of this woman’s work, most of it was literally just this one bit in different translations. And good luck finding it in the original language—at least in online resources. If I had a JSTOR account maybe I could have? I don’t know. I’d like to hear it spoke out loud.
> 
> 2\. SOLAR CYCLES: I realize that in the actual series, the sun seems to rise and set on a 24-hour cycle, even in the North Pole! But this could just be due to the time of year, and I love the idea of the long seasons of polar of darkness where the moon is just kind of...around all the time. I was actually researching Inuit names for constellations and one source mentioned that the moon being up all the time made it hard to see a lot of the stars and I thought that was really interesting.
> 
> https://sunrisesunset.com/calendar.asp?comb_city_info=McMurdo+Station%2C+Antarctica%3B-166.6693%3B-77.8456%3B12%3B5&time_type=0&ianatz=&back=&btop=&bbot=0&want_twi_civ=0&want_twi_naut=0&want_twi_astro=0&want_info=0&want_mphase=0&want_mrms=1&want_solar_noon=0&want_eqx_sol=0&want_daylen=0&month=8&year=2020
> 
> (I had tags on these but they kept getting stripped out and I am too lazy to make an effort to fix it so)
> 
> 3\. STUFF I READ THAT SNUCK INTO THIS KINDA WITHOUT MY SAY-SO
> 
> The White Darkness, David Grann  
> Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, Laurence Gonzalez  
> Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer  
> To Build a Fire, Jack London  
> Frozen Alive, Peter Stark


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